Cuba Diaries (44 page)

The priest says that as usual the Good Friday procession will not be allowed outside the church.

THE AMERICAN WOMEN
photographers who recently traveled around Cuba with Roberto said they managed to sleep in a private house in Remedios, on beds with Cabbage Patch Kids sheets, but Nick prefers a hotel, so we drive fifty more miles to where there is one, in Morón.

Morón
means idiot in Spanish, too. The room is spacious and clean. There is CNN. “I can't believe it,” Nick says. The bathroom, too, is modern and clean.

Eating a bland but edible dinner of chicken, rice, and beans in the dining room around nine-thirty, we look out through the windows to see two lone
jineteras
under a single streetlamp at the entrance to the hotel, one in over-the-knee boots with stacked soles. As we are ending the meal, we see them, with resigned gestures, clomp off in the direction of town. There are only five guests in the hotel.

We retire to our amazingly comfortable room, which costs thirty-four dollars with breakfast. We go to sleep but are awakened harshly at one in the morning by the noise and thump of a discotheque, which seems to be directly underneath our room. Nick puts on pants and goes downstairs. The night manager follows Nick back to our room, stands in the middle of the room, and says, “It's true, you can't sleep with this.” I put on my bathrobe and we are moved as far away from the discotheque as possible, into a cramped, unrenovated room.

“This is more like it,” Nick says.

Before we leave in the morning, we are given a basket of fruit, a bottle of wine, a baseball cap, a T-shirt, a pen, a 50 percent discount, and a personal apology from the manager.

EVEN USING A LOT
of pull, our Elegguá hasn't been able to get reservations for us in Santiago at the Hotel Casa Granda, on the main square, only at the ugly modern hotel outside of town. Nick takes one look at the modern hotel, and we head to the Casa Granda.

The desk clerk says there are no rooms available. We go outside to Roberto. “No rooms,” we say.

Roberto goes in. Five minutes later, he comes out. “You can go back in now and take your pick.”

The same desk clerk greets us. We are shown three rooms—one a suite, one overlooking the square, and one in the back. We choose the one overlooking the square.

A PLAQUE IS BEING
put back under the statue of the soldier with the Grace Kelly profile on top of San Juan Hill. The plaque sits on the ground next to the young people who are doing the restoring, two young women and a young man, who are carefully brushing the spot on the rock where the plaque will go and trying different sizes of screws.
TO THE MEN OF THE NEW YORK REGIMENT
, the plaque reads. There is another plaque on the ground next to another rock. It reads
TO THE MEN OF THE MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT
. We take a photo of them working.

The young man and one of the young women look annoyed, but the other young women smiles. “It's for the tourists—they want to know,” she explains.

“Siboney,” I see on the map. It is on the coast, with a little umbrella symbol next to it, indicating a beach. “Siboney” is the name of one of the most beautiful songs by Ernesto Lecuona, the Cuban composer. It takes us more than an hour to drive there. The drive, over green hills under a rising moon, is beautiful. We pass the hut where Fidel planned the attack on the Moncada barracks.

When we finally get to the former resort village, there are so many men, women, and children watching our every move that we don't know whether to place Roberto near the parked car or with our towels on the beach. Finally we decide to leave everything in the car with Roberto, including our sandals and our towels, and walk barefoot over the gravel to the water.

A man swims after us holding up a coconut for sale.

WE STOP AT A
deserted beach on the way from Santiago to Baracoa, just before Guantánamo. We plan to spend half an hour there but end up spending three hours. It is the kind of beach we have been looking for ever since we came to Cuba. It is utterly deserted and in a glorious setting—this we have found before. But this is the first time we have been on a deserted beach and not had to worry about our stuff. This is because it's
so
deserted. It's deserted because it's in a desert, a desert microclimate found between Santiago and Guantánamo. People cannot live here, and few have cars or reason enough to come here in the heat. Agave and cactus on steep hills frame small beaches, one after another. All we see in three hours is one spearfisherman.

THRONGS OF PEOPLE
on the street in Guantánamo. We think there is some kind of festival, but there are no banners. Roberto says it's just people looking for a ride. We look around. There are no cars. A truck passes and slows (it's the law that a truck with any kind of space in it has to pick people up), and people throw themselves on it, packing themselves in until they are hanging off the sides.

EL SOCIALISMO
, a sign in Guantánamo reads,
ADEMÁS DE SER JUSTICIA, ES EFICIENCIA Y CALIDAD
(Socialism, in addition to being justice, is efficiency and quality).

WE ARE AT THE
Spanish fort turned into a hotel in Baracoa, where I stayed with my brother and Marianne. Looking out through the sealed plate glass window, between the curtain and the air conditioner sealed with brown stuff, which has remained (I check it with a fingernail) gooey after two years, Nick says he didn't think Baracoa would be such a dump.

I say I never said it
wasn't a dump;
I just said it had other things in it besides things that made it a dump.

I send Roberto to find the architect Nelson Figueroa. He arrives, with a trimmer beard, looking dazed. I ask him if he remembers me from when I was there two years ago, with my brother and Marianne, the Canadian photographer. He says, “Of course . . . ,” but it is obvious that he doesn't. He looks stricken when I introduce him to Nick. I don't know whether it is because Nick is so tall (Nick is not really tall, just six foot one, but Nelson Figueroa is four foot ten) or because he is so serious-looking, but Nelson Figueroa is completely different from the way he was before. Then I figure it's the way he is around any woman with any tall, serious man attached to her.

Nelson Figueroa takes us on a walking tour of Baracoa. Baracoa is even more depressed than before. One or two buildings in the town seem to be operating as
paladares
, but to me the people look even more bedraggled than before.

Nick and I mention a kind of travel magazine that came out a few months ago, published by Benetton. It's a special issue devoted exclusively to Baracoa, in which Baracoa's poverty and degradation are presented as colorful tourist attractions to be exploited. There is an article on a coffin maker who makes five dollars a months. It is presented as a good thing, such a salary, as something that keeps him pure and unspoiled. There is an article titled “I Like Sex,” showing the good-looking young men and women of the town. In it,
they are quoted as saying that sex is their source of entertainment. Several young men and women are quoted as saying they especially like having sex with foreigners.

I am closer to Nelson Figueroa's level, and I can tell from his pleased expression when he opens his mouth at the mention of the Benetton magazine that he is about to say that it is a good thing, the magazine, that it has really put Baracoa on the map, and so on, but before he is able to say anything, Nick says the magazine is depressing and disgusting, and so Nelson Figueroa says, “Yes, it is disgusting.”

In chorus, Nick and I say that it's encouraging the dregs of Europe and every other place to come here. It will also cause the spread of AIDS.

Nelson Figueroa, looking more stricken, nods vigorously. “
Exactamente
,” he says, pointing into the air in front of us for emphasis.

Nelson Figueroa mentions a Dutch woman who is living in his house. We ask what she is doing in Baracoa. Nelson says she is doing research. We ask Nelson what she is doing research on. Nelson says he doesn't know. We ask Nelson if she is his girlfriend. Nelson makes a face and says she is not.

WE ITCH IN THE
night and find raised welts all over our bodies in the morning from
agua mala
, which we must have gotten the day before, when we lolled for three hours in the water.

Roberto goes to pick up Nelson Figueroa. Roberto finds him passed out in bed, having completely forgotten that we were supposed to meet. He arrives extremely hungover, his hair wet.

Nick wants to visit a chocolate factory. We have heard there is one in Baracoa. We pull up to it unannounced. An American family we know visited the factory a few years ago. They drove right up and went in with their four children. It is Saturday. Nick explains to a guard stepping out of a guard box that he is a director of Energy Consulting International (he gives the guard his card) and he was wondering if we could visit the chocolate factory. Nelson hangs back, after having said several times on the way to the factory that it would probably be impossible to visit it.

The guard calls a higher-up. The guard tells us that the higher-up says it is impossible to visit the factory without the permission of the director, who has to get it from the Committee of the 26th of July, who has to get it from the party.

Nelson Figueroa leads us to a fake farm geared to group tourism.
Bohíos
(thatched
guajiro
huts) with shined, intact cement floors. A
mulata
in
rumbera
costume smoking a cigar. Neat signs in front of plants:
CACAO, PINEAPPLE, MANGO, GUAVA
.

Nick keeps wandering off, leaving Nelson in midsentence.

“We want to go to a
river
,” I tell Nelson Figueroa. Last time I came here with Sam and Marianne, we heard about the rivers, but it was raining and chilly. Nelson Figueroa takes us to another fake primitive group-tourism establishment to look for a boat to take us up the Toa River. “It's just for a minute, ” he explains quickly.

A man is roasting a whole pig under a tent for a group of Swedish tourists who will be arriving. The boat is not there. Nelson stands there.

“I am
from America, too
,” I finally say.

“Go farther, go farther,” Nick says to Roberto, as we drive on a rough road up a bank of the Toa River, every time it looks like Roberto is about to stop. “Go farther,” Nelson, who has finally understood, says, too.

We put on our bathing suits, take off our shoes, and climb down an embankment into the Toa River. There is a small rapids. Nick gets in, feet first, hands behind his head, then Nelson Figueroa, then me. We float, letting the current take us.

Sometimes the river is deep and slow, sometimes shallow and rushing, but never rushing enough to cause us the slightest bruise or bang. The water is crystal clear. High above us on either side rise the riverbanks, covered in dense jungle. There are in the river no alligators, no snakes, and not one aggressive reptile, insect, or mammal. There are not many people, either, only an occasional hut with a woman outside it, washing clothes. The women smile at us and wave. Every hundred yards or so, there is a rock or a rise on which we can rest, feel the water rushing around us, soothing our
agua mala
welts, and contemplate Nelson Figueroa's hairy elfin body. The Toa is one of four rivers in Baracoa, the others being Doaba, the Miel, and the Yumurí. These rivers have never been exploited and cut through forests that have remained as they were when Columbus arrived here; it was on approaching a beach near Baracoa that Columbus said, “Never have human eyes beheld anything so beautiful.” There is no boat in the river and no one else in the river floating as we are. We float without sandals, without keys, without keep-dry bags, like otters, always to another bend in the river, to see what is beyond, and it is such a nice clear run that we float down it, too. After two and a half hours, we know we must be tired, though we do not feel tired. We stop not because we want to but because Nick and I are middle-aged and it's weird not to feel tired after floating for so long. We figure it's something the river has done to us, this
not feeling tired, and that maybe it does this, make you feel not tired, until you drop like a stone.

We have forgotten a towel and share our supplies of canned tuna, crackers, olives, nuts, and raisins with Nelson, standing on the sand. Nelson looks a little more relaxed now, but still stricken.

At the end of lunch we give Nelson an extra can of tuna from our picnic basket to take home, as well as a can of olives and a can of something we took out of the minibar of the hotel, thinking it was a beer, which turned out to be a nonalcoholic malt drink. When we have nothing else, we give money, but usually we give things. We think it is less embarrassing that way, when the recipient is a professional, but Nelson's fraught silence as we root in the picnic basket—a silence we understand only seconds after we have given him the tuna, the olives, and the malt drink—communicates telepathically:
It doesn't matter if I am an architect. Give me money
. Still we hold our ground—I don't know why.

ROBERTO FINDS A MUCH
better and cheaper
paladar
for us than the one we were in the night before with Nelson. I take Nick afterward to the bar of the Hotel La Rusa. La Rusa is for dollars now. Cubans no longer go there. Three lone tourists sit on the back veranda, staring out to sea.

On the way back to the hotel, Roberto begins a long, flowery speech about how much he respects us. We are, he says, like, like . . . we are younger, of course, than his parents are, and he hopes we don't mind him saying, but we are like parents to him. Yes, like parents. His hand sweeps down in front of the steering wheel with a flourish on the word
parents
. He cares about us. He really does. If we were other people, he wouldn't feel the need to say anything . . .